The Berkeley Bowl Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by the Extraordinary Produce of California's Most Iconic Market

Celebrating the unfamiliar yet extraordinary produce from California's most iconic market, Berkeley Bowl, this cookbook offers recipes for a panoply of fruits and vegetables that have been largely overlooked or forgotten in popular cuisine.

Registered dietitian Laura McLively, an avid home cook and creator of the popular blog MyBerkeleyBowl, created a recipe for every unfamiliar or "exotic" fruit and vegetable she found at Berkeley Bowl. Here is a collection of her favorite discoveries, and a tribute to the remarkable, 40-year-old family-run market that inspired them.

Shining a spotlight on the versatile and unique qualities of the astonishingly beautiful, plant-based bounty that's available to vegetarians and meat eaters alike, these recipes and photographs will help you embrace hundreds of exciting fruits and vegetables you may never have tasted or thought of cooking, including crunchy sea bean spindles, tubers bigger than a toddler, wiry haired rambutans, and wrinkly skinned Indian bitter melon. Eating more types and colors of plants exposes us to a wider variety of nutrients, antioxidants, and beneficial bacteria.

Berkeley Bowl is a mecca for great chefs, and with the recipes in this cookbook, you'll see why. Even if you don't live near Berkeley Bowl, getting your hands on these ingredients can be a fun and rewarding experience in its own right, and cooking with them will make your meals explode with flavors, textures, and new culinary adventures for all your senses.

Partial list of recipes:
Green Garlic Soup with Lemon Cardamom Yogurt
Sweet & Sour Tofu with Gooseberry
Charred Nopal and Black-eyed Pea Chili
Corn and Chive Stuffed Squash Blossoms
Pepino Melon Poke
Stuffed Indian Eggplant
Morel Pot Pie
Starfruit Almond Torte


About the Author
Laura McLively is an Oakland, California based registered dietitian and food writer. An avid home cook, Laura is the creator of MyBerkeleyBowl, a popular blog about cooking with unusual fruits and vegetables from Berkeley Bowl, from which the seeds for this book took root. Her mother, who was raised in Spain, exposed her at a young age to the joys of cooking Mediterranean and international cuisine. Laura McLively is a frequent contributor to the food and recipe section of the Oakland Tribune and San Jose Mercury News. She has worked at the Native American Health Center in Oakland since 2009, where she is currently the Director of Nutrition and Fitness.

Berkeley based photographer Erin Scott's images have been featured in Saveur, Huffington Post, Jamie Oliver, The San Francisco Chronicle, Sunset Magazine, Cottages + Bungalows, Refinery 29 and many many other publications. Her pictures are found in cookbooks published by Ten Speed Press and Roost Books as well as Parallax Press and others, and she is the author, photographer, and stylist of The Yummy Supper Cookbook.